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Italian Stew
Fry out a slice of salt pork. Have three pounds of beef for a pot roast cut in pieces; brown these in the pork fat.
Put the meat in a large saucepan without water, add four onions cut in pieces, six tomatoes peeled and sliced (canned tomatoes will do), and a bunch of sweet herbs and parsley chopped fine, with a spoon of salt. Cover and stew four or five hours on the back of the stove. The cover should be tight, and the process slow, until the vegetables have melted away, and the meat is tender.
A slow braise with no added liquid — the onions and tomatoes must supply all of it, so the seal on the pot matters more than anything else here.
- The hinge: a tight lid, no waterThe recipe adds no liquid at all, relying on the tomatoes and onions to render enough moisture over hours. Use a heavy Dutch oven with a well-fitting lid; if steam escapes freely the meat will scorch before it is tender.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the cool corner, holding a pot at a bare shiver. The recipe gives no oven or heat setting; on a modern burner the nearest equivalent is the lowest setting with a diffuser, or a low oven (around 300F) for the same four to five hours.
- Beef for a pot roastChuck, blade or boneless short rib. Cut into pieces of about two inches; round is too lean to survive this long and will come out dry and stringy.
- Salt porkWidely sold still, near the bacon; unsmoked, heavily salted belly or fatback. A couple of ounces of diced pancetta or thick bacon substitutes, though bacon brings smoke the original did not have.
- A bunch of sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for a tied bundle of soft-flavoured herbs, commonly some mix of thyme, marjoram, savory and a bay leaf; the recipe names parsley separately. Tie them in string or cheesecloth so the stems can be pulled out at the end.
- SaltA "spoon of salt" against three pounds of beef plus salt pork is generous. Start with about two teaspoons of kosher salt and correct at the end, once the liquid has concentrated.
- TomatoesSix fresh tomatoes is roughly two pounds; a 28-ounce can, drained of its thinnest juice, is the equivalent. Canned are the more reliable choice outside late summer.
- Timing and yieldFour hours is usually enough for chuck; check at three and a half. Serves six, and wants bread, polenta or boiled potatoes to carry the sauce the melted vegetables leave behind.
American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used "Italian" loosely, most often to signal tomatoes, garlic or onions and a long slow simmer rather than any particular regional dish. This is essentially a stufato in outline — meat browned, then left to cook down with onion and tomato until the vegetables collapse into sauce — and it appears in mainstream household books during the decades of heavy Italian immigration, a period when tomatoes and pasta were moving from the immigrant table to the general one. The technique itself is older and not Italian at all: no-water braising on the cool end of a range made use of a coal fire's dying heat, and recipes of this vintage often end with the same instruction to set the pot back and leave it.